On a pleasant Friday on Brooklyn’s Court Street, it felt as if the Grim Reaper had swooped in for the kill. All day, people tiptoed inside the market known by the oxymoronic name plastered on its awning — Super Deli Grocery — contemplating nearly bare shelves and consoling the teary-eyed owner. Some talked in mournful whispers.

“You got any bagels left?” chirped a pair of clueless hipsters who strolled in. Proprietor Soonae Yi bowed her head solemnly, and shook her head. No.

RIP, Super Deli Grocery.

Arrivederci, Joe’s Superette.

Hasta la vista, Fountain Café.

It’s time to turn out the lights on all dying, immigrant-owned businesses that used to dot this city like a checkerboard, from Italian mom-and-pop bakeries offering 30-cent cupcakes that rival Magnolia’s $3.50 monstrosities, to Syrian-owned cafes serving $3.50 falafel sandwiches.

One by one, these irreplaceable jewels are absorbed by upscale, cookie-cutter chains and impersonal fern bars serving $18 burgers and $6 lattes. And overpriced boutiques, like American Apparel, whose stretchy duds won’t last a year.

I like gentrification as much as the next city dweller. But when did this town turn into a climate-controlled shopping mall?

Super Deli Grocery sat at 236 Court St. for 14 years, and next door for six years before that. When she came here from South Korea, Soonae, 40, and husband Songhoon, 49, (both pictured) opened a tiny store whose fresh flowers offered the only color on a then-bleak sidewalk, and sold fresh fruits and vegetables you could haul without a car. As of today, it’s gone forever.

It was more than just a place to snag a $1 coffee or a pack of smokes.

“I love the people who run this store,” he said as he picked up a few remaining boxes of cereal, selling at two for one.

A dispute with the landlord over repair work led the Yis to close. But their sadness is tempered by relief. Who wants to work up to 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week?

The drill is repeated every day, in neighborhoods all over town. Small, ethnic businesses are run out by skyrocketing rents, stealth city inspections and fines, competition from Pac-Man-like chain stores — plus, owner fatigue. Enough is enough.

Nowhere is this more evident that in the Korean groceries, once the object of fascination — a store was featured in Spike Lee’s 1989 “Do the Right Thing” — as well as hatred. The 1990 Al Sharpton- and Sonny Carson-led boycott of two Korean groceries in Brooklyn was a shame on this city, and helped drive Mayor David Dinkins from office.

Now, the stores are vanishing without help.

Queens College Professor Pyong Gap Min determined that in 1991, 2,500 Korean-owned groceries dotted the city. Now, he estimates there are between 1,000 and 1,500 left, and dropping daily.

In Woodside, Queens, the once-dominant stores have all but disappeared. In central Harlem, 55 Korean-owned groceries thrived in 1991, said Min. In 2006, there were 14.

In 10 years, there will be none, predicted Chong Sik Lee, president of the Korean-American Grocers Association.

“I give up,” said Soonae. “I’m tired.” She pointed to her daughter, Rebecca, 18, working the register. She’s on her way to college in Boston to study pharmacology.

This is how a city loses it character. A wound that is, in part, self-inflicted.

RIP.

Low-rent stars of NY

The rent is too damn low—for the lucky and the connected.

The landlord of film siren Faye Dunaway, 70, is battling to evict her from a rent-stabilized Manhattan walkup in which she’s lived for 17 years and pays $1,048 a month, because, he claims, Faye lives mainly in California. The place should rent for more than $2,300. Faye says you can’t evict me—I’ve moved! So where are the keys? See ya in court.

The landlord of Jimmy McMillan, former gubernatorial candidate and founder of the—believe it—Rent is Too Damn High Party, wants the admitted porn-watching pot-smoker booted from the $873-a-month East Village flat he’s rented since 1977, because he really lives in Brooklyn. McMillan, 64, is planning a presidential run.

Why can’t ordinary mortals snag these sweet deals?

It’s Tea slime at the Paper of Record

Vice President Joe Biden must take his nasty cues from The New York Times.

Biden last week was heard saying Tea Party members “acted like terrorists” while debating the debt ceiling. (The veep insists he simply shut his yap while others compared Tea Partiers to “terrorists.”) This is what the Paper of Record unashamedly published Tuesday:

“You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them,” wrote columnist Joe Nocera.

“These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people . . . Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.”

On Saturday, Nocera grudgingly apologized.

A month from the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we’ve got “terrorists,” “jihad” and “blowing up the country” — and that’s just the first two paragraphs!

Even Biden isn’t that quick.

Vice President Joe Biden must take his nasty cues from The New York Times.

Biden last week was heard saying Tea Party members “acted like terrorists” while debating the debt ceiling. (The veep insists he simply shut his yap while others compared Tea Partiers to “terrorists.”) This is what the Paper of Record unashamedly published Tuesday:

“You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them,” wrote columnist Joe Nocera.

“These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people . . . Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.”

On Saturday, Nocera grudgingly apologized.

A month from the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we’ve got “terrorists,” “jihad” and “blowing up the country” — and that’s just the first two paragraphs!

Even Biden isn’t that quick.

Bongo’s the ‘stuff’ of dreams

A Manhattan couple’s frantic search for their 10-year-old stuffed monkey, Bongo, ended after the dust collector was found by an unemployed man in Park Slope.

But first, Luis Barreto, 61, “fell in love with Bongo” and had to be begged to take the $500 reward and return the inanimate beast.

Jack Zinzi, 58, and Bonni Marcus, 47, believed the doll was their kid, taking him everywhere and providing him identical siblings named Do, Ray and Me.

Strip this judge naked. Staten Island Judge Robert Collini sentenced a monster father to four months at Rikers — to be served on weekends! — for stripping his 10-year-old son, beating him on the back with a spatula, burning his hands on a stove and stuffing the kid into an oven. Daddy Dearest James Moss said he thought his boy had swiped $20 from his wallet.

Moss’ son Chris, now 11, who suffers from a wicked case of Stockholm syndrome, begged the judge to take it easy. And like a fool, Collini obeyed. It’s not for lack of Dad’s trying that Chris wasn’t permanently maimed, or worse. It can happen again.